LUYỆN ĐỌC TIẾNG ANH QUA TÁC PHẨM VĂN HỌC-SHORT STORY BY O’HENRY -The Handbook Of Hymen

I am going on to tell you how the weather furnished me and Idaho Green with an elegant education.. When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each other's jokes and pra

SHORT STORY BY O’HENRY

The Handbook Of Hymen

'Tis the opinion of myself, Sanderson Pratt, who sets this down, that the educational system of the United States should be in the hands of the

weather bureau I can give you good reasons for it; and you can't tell me why our college professors shouldn't be transferred to the meteorological

department They have been learned to read; and they could very easily glance at the morning papers and then wire in to the main office what kind

of weather to expect But there's the other side of the proposition I am going

on to tell you how the weather furnished me and Idaho Green with an

elegant education

We was up in the Bitter Root Mountains over the Montana line prospecting for gold A chin-whiskered man in Walla-Walla, carrying a line of hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; and there we was in the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army through a peace conference

Along one day comes a mail-rider over the mountains from Carlos, and stops

to eat three cans of greengages, and leave us a newspaper of modern date This paper prints a system of premonitions of the weather, and the card it dealt Bitter Root Mountains from the bottom of the deck was "warmer and fair, with light westerly breezes."

That evening it began to snow, with the wind strong in the east Me and

Idaho moved camp into an old empty cabin higher up the mountain, thinking

it was only a November flurry But after falling three foot on a level it went

to work in earnest; and we knew we was snowed in We got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub enough for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they thought proper

If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men up in a eighteen by twenty-foot cabin for a month Human nature won't stand it

When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each other's jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet and called bread At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind of a edict to me Says he:

"I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of

a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation The kind of half- masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow's cud, only she's lady enough to keep hers to

herself, and you ain't."

"Mr Green," says I, "you having been a friend of mine once, I have some hesitations in confessing to you that if I had my choice for society between you and a common yellow, three-legged cur pup, one of the inmates of this here cabin would be wagging a tail just at present."

This way we goes on for two or three days, and then we quits speaking to one another We divides up the cooking implements, and Idaho cooks his

grub on one side of the fireplace, and me on the other The snow is up to the windows, and we have to keep a fire all day

You see me and Idaho never had any education beyond reading and doing

"if John had three apples and James five" on a slate We never felt any

special need for a university degree, though we had acquired a species of intrinsic intelligence in knocking around the world that we could use in emergencies But, snowbound in that cabin in the Bitter Roots, we felt for the first time that if we had studied Homer or Greek and fractions and the higher branches of information, we'd have had some resources in the line of meditation and private thought I've seen them Eastern college fellows

working in camps all through the West, and I never noticed but what

education was less of a drawback to 'em than you would think Why, once over on Snake River, when Andrew McWilliams' saddle horse got the botts,

he sent a buckboard ten miles for one of these strangers that claimed to be a botanist But that horse died

One morning Idaho was poking around with a stick on top of a little shelf that was too high to reach Two books fell down to the floor I started toward 'em, but caught Idaho's eye He speaks for the first time in a week

"Don't burn your fingers," says he "In spite of the fact that you're only fit to

be the companion of a sleeping mud-turtle, I'll give you a square deal And that's more than your parents did when they turned you loose in the world with the sociability of a rattle-snake and the bedside manner of a frozen turnip I'll play you a game of seven-up, the winner to pick up his choice of the book, the loser to take the other."

We played; and Idaho won He picked up his book; and I took mine Then each of us got on his side of the house and went to reading

I never was as glad to see a ten-ounce nugget as I was that book And Idaho took at his like a kid looks at a stick of candy

Mine was a little book about five by six inches called "Herkimer's Handbook

of Indispensable Information." I may be wrong, but I think that was the greatest book that ever was written I've got it to-day; and I can stump you or any man fifty times in five minutes with the information in it Talk about Solomon or the New York Tribune! Herkimer had cases on both of 'em That man must have put in fifty years and travelled a million miles to find out all that stuff There was the population of all cities in it, and the way to tell a girl's age, and the number of teeth a camel has It told you the longest tunnel

in the world, the number of the stars, how long it takes for chicken pox to break out, what a lady's neck ought to measure, the veto powers of

Governors, the dates of the Roman aqueducts, how many pounds of rice going without three beers a day would buy, the average annual temperature

of Augusta, Maine, the quantity of seed required to plant an acre of carrots

in drills, antidotes for poisons, the number of hairs on a blond lady's head, how to preserve eggs, the height of all the mountains in the world, and the dates of all wars and battles, and how to restore drowned persons, and

sunstroke, and the number of tacks in a pound, and how to make dynamite and flowers and beds, and what to do before the doctor comes and a

hundred times as many things besides If there was anything Herkimer didn't know I didn't miss it out of the book

I sat and read that book for four hours All the wonders of education was compressed in it I forgot the snow, and I forgot that me and old Idaho was

on the outs He was sitting still on a stool reading away with a kind of partly soft and partly mysterious look shining through his tan-bark whiskers

"Idaho," says I, "what kind of a book is yours?"

Idaho must have forgot, too, for he answered moderate, without any slander

or malignity

"Why," says he, "this here seems to be a volume by Homer K M."

"Homer K M what?" I asks

"Why, just Homer K M.," says he

"You're a liar," says I, a little riled that Idaho should try to put me up a tree

"No man is going 'round signing books with his initials If it's Homer K M Spoopendyke, or Homer K M McSweeney, or Homer K M Jones, why don't you say so like a man instead of biting off the end of it like a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt on a clothes- line?"

"I put it to you straight, Sandy," says Idaho, quiet "It's a poem book," says

he, "by Homer K M I couldn't get colour out of it at first, but there's a vein

if you follow it up I wouldn't have missed this book for a pair of red

blankets."

"You're welcome to it," says I "What I want is a disinterested statement of facts for the mind to work on, and that's what I seem to find in the book I've drawn."

"What you've got," says Idaho, "is statistics, the lowest grade of information that exists They'll poison your mind Give me old K M.'s system of

surmises He seems to be a kind of a wine agent His regular toast is 'nothing doing,' and he seems to have a grouch, but he keeps it so well lubricated with booze that his worst kicks sound like an invitation to split a quart But it's poetry," says Idaho, "and I have sensations of scorn for that truck of yours that tries to convey sense in feet and inches When it comes to

explaining the instinct of philosophy through the art of nature, old K M has got your man beat by drills, rows, paragraphs, chest measurement, and

average annual rainfall."

So that's the way me and Idaho had it Day and night all the excitement we got was studying our books That snowstorm sure fixed us with a fine lot of attainments apiece By the time the snow melted, if you had stepped up to

me suddenly and said: "Sanderson Pratt, what would it cost per square foot

to lay a roof with twenty by twenty- eight tin at nine dollars and fifty cents per box?" I'd have told you as quick as light could travel the length of a spade handle at the rate of one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles per second How many can do it? You wake up 'most any man you know in the middle of the night, and ask him quick to tell you the number of bones in the human skeleton exclusive of the teeth, or what percentage of the vote of the Nebraska Legislature overrules a veto Will he tell you? Try him and see

About what benefit Idaho got out of his poetry book I didn't exactly know Idaho boosted the wine-agent every time he opened his mouth; but I wasn't

so sure

This Homer K M., from what leaked out of his libretto through Idaho, seemed to me to be a kind of a dog who looked at life like it was a tin can tied to his tail After running himself half to death, he sits down, hangs his tongue out, and looks at the can and says:

"Oh, well, since we can't shake the growler, let's get it filled at the corner, and all have a drink on me."

Besides that, it seems he was a Persian; and I never hear of Persia producing anything worth mentioning unless it was Turkish rugs and Maltese cats

That spring me and Idaho struck pay ore It was a habit of ours to sell out quick and keep moving We unloaded our grubstaker for eight thousand dollars apiece; and then we drifted down to this little town of Rosa, on the Salmon river, to rest up, and get some human grub, and have our whiskers harvested

Rosa was no mining-camp It laid in the valley, and was as free of uproar and pestilence as one of them rural towns in the country There was a three-mile trolley line champing its bit in the environs; and me and Idaho spent a week riding on one of the cars, dropping off at nights at the Sunset View Hotel Being now well read as well as travelled, we was soon pro re nata

with the best society in Rosa, and was invited out to the most dressed-up and high-toned entertainments It was at a piano recital and quail-eating contest

in the city hall, for the benefit of the fire company, that me and Idaho first met Mrs De Ormond Sampson, the queen of Rosa society

Mrs Sampson was a widow, and owned the only two-story house in town It was painted yellow, and whichever way you looked from you could see it as plain as egg on the chin of an O'Grady on a Friday Twenty-two men in Rosa besides me and Idaho was trying to stake a claim on that yellow house

There was a dance after the song books and quail bones had been raked out

of the Hall Twenty-three of the bunch galloped over to Mrs Sampson and asked for a dance I side-stepped the two-step, and asked permission to

escort her home That's where I made a hit

On the way home says she:

"Ain't the stars lovely and bright to-night, Mr Pratt?"

"For the chance they've got," says I, "they're humping themselves in a

mighty creditable way That big one you see is sixty-six million miles

distant It took thirty-six years for its light to reach us With an eighteen-foot telescope you can see forty-three millions of 'em, including them of the thirteenth magnitude, which, if one was to go out now, you would keep on seeing it for twenty-seven hundred years."

"My!" says Mrs Sampson "I never knew that before How warm it is! I'm

as damp as I can be from dancing so much."

"That's easy to account for," says I, "when you happen to know that you've got two million sweat-glands working all at once If every one of your

perspiratory ducts, which are a quarter of an inch long, was placed end to end, they would reach a distance of seven miles."

"Lawsy!" says Mrs Sampson "It sounds like an irrigation ditch you was describing, Mr Pratt How do you get all this knowledge of information?"

"From observation, Mrs Sampson," I tells her "I keep my eyes open when I

go about the world."

"Mr Pratt," says she, "I always did admire a man of education There are so few scholars among the sap-headed plug-uglies of this town that it is a real pleasure to converse with a gentleman of culture I'd be gratified to have you call at my house whenever you feel so inclined."

And that was the way I got the goodwill of the lady in the yellow house Every Tuesday and Friday evening I used to go there and tell her about the wonders of the universe as discovered, tabulated, and compiled from nature

by Herkimer Idaho and the other gay Lutherans of the town got every

minute of the rest of the week that they could

I never imagined that Idaho was trying to work on Mrs Sampson with old

K M.'s rules of courtship till one afternoon when I was on my way over to take her a basket of wild hog-plums I met the lady coming down the lane

that led to her house Her eyes was snapping, and her hat made a dangerous dip over one eye

"Mr Pratt," she opens up, "this Mr Green is a friend of yours, I believe."

"For nine years," says I

"Cut him out," says she "He's no gentleman!"

"Why ma'am," says I, "he's a plain incumbent of the mountains, with

asperities and the usual failings of a spendthrift and a liar, but I never on the most momentous occasion had the heart to deny that he was a gentleman It may be that in haberdashery and the sense of arrogance and display Idaho offends the eye, but inside, ma'am, I've found him impervious to the lower grades of crime and obesity After nine years of Idaho's society, Mrs

Sampson," I winds up, "I should hate to impute him, and I should hate to see him imputed."

"It's right plausible of you, Mr Pratt," says Mrs Sampson, "to take up the curmudgeons in your friend's behalf; but it don't alter the fact that he has made proposals to me sufficiently obnoxious to ruffle the ignominy of any lady."

"Why, now, now, now!" says I "Old Idaho do that! I could believe it of myself, sooner I never knew but one thing to deride in him; and a blizzard was responsible for that Once while we was snow-bound in the mountains

he became a prey to a kind of spurious and uneven poetry, which may have